Atlas Genius – Nobody Loves Like You Review

Wonderful what you can find at the bottom of your email tray. Step up, Atlas Genius. Let us hear your profound notions whirring away in the headspace of Australian rock. Dust off the files and move aside the plate of sourdough and cheese. We have on our hands Nobody Loves Like You. Lest we judge a song by its title but it sounds like the duo has been affected by the relentless closeness of bodies ejecting love and insisting on passion. Where would we be without the sweet embrace Atlas Genius muse on here? We would be worse off without assertions of heavenly encounters though for a rock outfit to make this noise over a decade into their trajectory showcases what some may call a lack of perspective. Nobody Loves Like You, paired with Romans, sounds good enough to work on an initial, one-and-done basis.  

Keep it this way, the spacemen-sounding notions of a song slightly riffed from Arcade Fire’s Reflektor single is only earnest in short bursts. Nobody could love as well as Atlas Genius. These assertions of love as independent and unique processes imply the lack of rivalry and jealousy at the core of any honest track of emotive clarity. In these specifics we find ourselves and in Nobody Loves Like You we find a primitive recognition of intimacy set to slick guitars and electronic gibberish. Repeat the thought nobody loves you and it becomes truth in your mind. As sick as it sounds and as horrid a tone it takes, it becomes the inevitability of a mind ruined by a state of being isolated from the truth. This is not the core of Nobody Loves Like You but what Atlas Genius hopes you may project onto it – for their thoughts and creativity stop short of unique reason and message. 

Follow-up piece Romans floats through with an idle rock riff lifted right from the heart of the early 2010s. Slick and indestructible instrumentals feel emptied of heart and instead utilise a form of metaphorical, historical context dumped at the side of respectable recording studios a decade ago. But Atlas Genius is clinging on and hoping they can swerve some relevancy into these possibilities of historical accuracy – they hope to fight on as the Romans did. But their subversion of brutality and pockets of political and warfare interest from the past are just the skittery backdrop to a primitive love track where the duo performs acts of make-believe. 

Routine and twee yet something within sticks with Atlas Genius. They are convinced this is the route and more power to them for making light works which feel forgettable but activate those same, foot-tapping abilities only the most irritating, yet popular, pop songs can manage. Tread the line carefully, lads, for it will crack underneath you. Whatever the case to be made for Nobody Loves Like You can be, it all leads back to the plain understanding as love perceived as a basic interaction. There is no room for complexity in the mind of Atlas Genius and it decimates any chance the song has at articulating the experience of gaining and losing this intimate rarity.